Saturday, 9 April 2011

Clarity begins at home: An open letter to Labour NO.

If AV is a good enough system with which to elect the Labour Leader (and Ed M. wouldn't have become Lab Leader without it), isn't it a good enough system with which to select our MPs? Here's a real challenge for Labour NO supporters: Put your money where your mouth is, and if you are so against AV, then propose that future Lab Leadership elections take place by FPTP...

And what a bad joke that would be, were it to happen, and were Labour members to have to decide whether (to take the example of the Leadership election we have just had) to 'tactically vote' or not. E.g. Diane Abbott supporters would have had to decide whether or not to abandon her and just vote straight for Ed, without being able to vote for who they really wanted, or whether to risk David winning...I put it to you, everyone in Labour NO, that this thought experiment pretty thoroughly demolishes the case for a NO vote on May 5. It is clear that FPTP is a broken system, in multi-Party / multi-candidate contests. It really is quite hopeless, to try to defend it, outside of a 2-Party system context.

Clarity begins at home. If you are so clear in your own minds that AV is a bad system, you need to draw the logical conclusion: you need to get rid of it for your own internal elections. That I hear no-one proposing to do so speaks volumes to me: in your hearts, you know that AV is a better system than FPTP for a modern plural democracy.

If AV is a good enough system with which to elect the Labour Leader (and Ed M. wouldn't have become Lab Leader without it), isn't it a good enough system with which to select our MPs? Here's a real challenge for Labour NO supporters: Put your money where your mouth is, and if you are so against AV, then propose that future Lab Leadership elections take place by FPTP...

And what a bad joke that would be, were it to happen, and were Labour members to have to decide whether (to take the example of the Leadership election we have just had) to 'tactically vote' or not. E.g. Diane Abbott supporters would have had to decide whether or not to abandon her and just vote straight for Ed, without being able to vote for who they really wanted, or whether to risk David winning...I put it to you, everyone in Labour NO, that this thought experiment pretty thoroughly demolishes the case for a NO vote on May 5. It is clear that FPTP is a broken system, in multi-Party / multi-candidate contests. It really is quite hopeless, to try to defend it, outside of a 2-Party system context.

Clarity begins at home. If you are so clear in your own minds that AV is a bad system, you need to draw the logical conclusion: you need to get rid of it for your own internal elections. That I hear no-one proposing to do so speaks volumes to me: in your hearts, you know that AV is a better system than FPTP for a modern plural democracy.